BROCKELMAN - The Failure of The Radical Democractic Imaginary

Thomas Brockelman
T h e fa ilu re o f th e ra d ic a l
d e m o c ra tic im a g in a ry
Z
izek versus Laclau and Mouffe on

vestigial utopia
Abstract Starting from the authors critique of Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe, this essay offers a comprehensive interpretation of Slavoj
Z
izeks political theory. Z
izeks position drives a wedge between two

concepts foundational to Laclau and Mouffes radical democratic theory,
namely antagonism and anti-essentialism. Anti-essentialism, it is argued,
carries with it a residual utopianism i.e. a view of political theory as
offering a vision of a desirable radicalized society or a radical democratic
imaginary that the more radical concept of antagonism forbids. Effec-
tively, anti-essentialism is shown to produce a new kind of ideology, an
ideology that Z
izek, deeply critical, associates with the shortcomings of

multi-culturalism and political correctness.
The essay ends with a critical consideration of Z
izeks claim that he

himself produced a systematic political theory based upon the insight of
antagonism. Having constructed (by way of return to Marx and Engels)
a version of Z
izeks project that makes sense of his derision for anti-

utopianism by positing a utopian theory without any imaginary support,
the article closes with critical comments about the effectiveness of such a
position. Z
izek is seen to offer us a powerful political theory, one that

unmasks the hypocrisy in much contemporary work, but also a theory
whose limits must give us pause.
Key words antagonism anti-essentialism anti-utopianism Jacques
Lacan Ernesto Laclau Chantal Mouffe radical democratic imaginary
radical democratic theory utopia Slavoj Z
izek
PSC
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM
vol 29 no 2
pp. 183208
Copyright 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
[0191- 4537(200303)29:2;183208;031144]
05Brockelman (bc/d) 1/29/03 11:06 AM Page 183
The political thought of the Slovenian psychoanalyst and theorist Slavoj
Z
izek has found only a rather puzzling reception in the United States.
While Z
izek has been remarkably prolic producing more than a book

a year since his The Sublime Object of I deology (1989) full philo-
sophical interpretations of his work have been scarce.
1
Furthermore, the
most visible readings of Z
izeks political theory have emerged from a

puzzling and, I will argue, deceptive context, the context of the neo-
Gramscian and post structuralist-inspired radical democratic theory of
which the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe is the best-known
example. To read Z
izek in such a context is certainly understandable:

both his longtime association with Mouffe and Laclau
2
and the
occasional sympathetic references within his work point in the direction
of a shared position.
3
Indeed, to dissociate Z
izeks project from the

project of radical democratic theory is, to a certain extent, to read
against his own avowed intention.
Still, interpreted in the light of the project announced in Laclau and
Mouffes Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,
4
Z
izek the political theorist

emerges, at best, as a thinker of secondary importance, a kind of
younger sibling mostly interested in subsidiary issues having to do with
lm and popular culture. More frequently even, his work is simply dis-
missed by those sympathetic to Laclau and Mouffe his Lacanian
approach to the political derided as formalist and obfuscating:
5
if his
writing is taken as having the same intention as other radical democratic
theorists, then it is inevitably read as less successful in achieving those
ends than the writing of others.
My contention in the following pages will be that the perspective
forced by the project of a neo-Gramscian radical democratic theory
seriously distorts any real understanding of Z
izeks thought. Indeed,

such distortion is inevitable since the primary insight in Z
izeks work is
precisely a devastating critique of the position outlined in Hegemony
and exfoliated in numerous places since. Departing not from the
apparent coziness of Z
izek and the authors of Hegemony but rather

from the underlying insight about the political contained in Z
izeks
writing, we nd a reasoned pessimism about the viability of the very
project of political theory as Laclau and Mouffe see it. If Z
izek is right,
then the very concepts with which radical democratic theorists hope to
reinspire mass action supporting leftist causes actually only undermine
the position from which they announce them. For Z
izek, Laclau and

Mouffes political theory leads us to aporia rather than to political
engagement.
184
Phi l osophy & Soci al Cri t i ci sm 29 (2)
I Radical democratic theory and the remains of Utopia
In an era when participation in democratic politics is plummeting in
most of the large Western democracies and when the transformation of
citizens into consumers of government services seems almost complete,
the project of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and their followers, a
project that aims at constructing a we based upon the ideals of a
certain radical democratic tradition, seems enormously refreshing.
6
What Laclau and Mouffe aim to do together in their pathbreaking
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy(1985) and separately in several works
since the publication of that book is nothing less than to reinvigorate
liberal democracy. By articulating (more on this technical term later)
this radical democratic identity as an ideal toward which different
groups might strive, in making the democratic project once again com-
pelling, Mouffe and Laclau undertake a project of obvious importance.
My references to the radical democratic imaginary, to ideals or
even to the construction of group identity, should not allow us to believe
our authors naive. If something of Western utopianism seems to squeeze
through the closing door of critique for Laclau and Mouffe, it is only
as a much reduced remainder, one thoroughly corrected by the problems
of utopian thought with which all intellectuals, at the beginning of the
21st century, must have some familiarity. In a sense, the impossibility
of the utopian is the very starting-point of radical democratic theory.
No more, then, the rationalist claims of fully realized democracy still
prevalent in materialist Marxism: no, such realization is by the very
nature of the political held to be impossible.
But the problem of the utopian and of the totalitarian potential of
theory has had and continues to have a devastating effect on any
proposed renewal of the political any re-emergence of the radical left
in the wake of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union. That is,
it often seems that the very critique of utopian thinking, largely devel-
oped by Liberal and Conservative thinkers, leaves no room for the
visionary appeal upon which revolutions must be based. Any image of
a radically different society seems to invite the stamp of totalitarian-
ism that is the ultimate stigma for a political theory.
In the light of this problem, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
attempts two things both in an effort to defend the new social move-
ments that, since the 1960s, have largely taken the place of traditional
leftist movements in politics. First, Hegemony completes a critique of
the Marxist tradition aimed against its implicit essentialism. Under this
project, Laclau and Mouffe attack both the specic economism of
Second International Marxism the dogmatic treatment of economic
relations as an ultimate self-contained grounding reality impervious to
other social/cultural spheres and the general determinismimplied by
185
Brockel man: Fai l ure of t he radi cal democrat i c i magi nar y
such a base/superstructure model. This part of Laclau and Mouffes
project is largely a rejection of the traditions of Marxist ideology
critique and is aimed at legitimizing social movements like feminism or
indigenous identity struggles which cannot be reduced to a particular
economic position (the working class). On the other hand, however,
Hegemony attempts to remove the shackles limiting leftist theories
(and, implicitly, the development of Leftist politics in relationship to
such theory) by proposing the radical democratic imaginary as a non-
totalitarian remainder of the utopian tradition.
Anti-essentialism allows Hegemony to arrange a marriage between
a certain interpretation of poststructuralism and Gramscian analysis.
Both are taken to indicate a kind of conventionalism. So ltered, Laclau
and Mouffes version of diacritical anti-essentialism meshes well with
the Gramscian conceptions of articulation and hegemony. Gramsci
proposes that questions of social identity and action are not referable
to any external idea. Articulation allows us to understand an identity
as something other than a platonic essence. It is, rather, taken to be
the result of the combination of two elements within a differential
system of signiers (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 105). This combination
produces an explicitly new meaning thus, its freedom from any xed
or natural understanding of meaning. That is, because the modied
terms (say, gay and progressive), while altered, retain something of
their independence from each other (we can certainly still imagine
non-progressive gays and vice versa), the identity is clearly produced
rather than something pre-existent. In the same vein, Laclau and Mouffe
invoke hegemony to explain the nature of social identities given their
argument that they have no underlying (platonic) reality. Hegemony,
they explain, refers to an absent totality, and to the diverse attempts at
recomposition and rearticulation which, in overcoming this original
absense, made it possible for struggles to be given a meaning and for
historical forces to be endowed with full positivity (1985: 7). In other
words, the beginning-point of Laclau and Mouffes argument is the non-
existenceof external truth in relationship to society.
Clearly, such a position does away with the tradition of rationalist
utopianism: no city is laid in heaven as rational blueprint for society.
Nor can we dream of getting beyond politics to a kind of rational
administration of things. But the elimination of rationalist utopianism
should not be confounded with the constriction of politically oriented
utopian imagination. According to Laclau and Mouffe, in the age of
globalization and after the fall of the Soviet bloc we face an exhaustion
of political imagination which leads to derision of genuine political
decision-making. In this atmosphere, only the right can form a unifying
vision. The absence of a political frontier, writes Mouffe, is the
symptom of a void that can endanger democracy because that void
186
provides a terrain that can be occupied by the extreme right to articulate
new anti-democratic political identities (Mouffe, 1993: 56). And
Laclau, in another context, afrms the importance of such a re-formation
of a radical democratic imaginary. Given the decline of the two
horizons that had traditionally structured its discourse: communism
and . . . the welfare state the demand is for (a) renewed vision(s) of a
transformed society: there will be no renaissance of the Left without
the construction of a new social imaginary.
7
The real question is what this renewal calls for and what it means:
what is the radical democratic imaginary that Laclau and Mouffe both
invoke? And the rst answer to this question quite in line with their
conventionalist and historicist position is that it does not necessarily
mean any one thing at all. That is, when faced with the challenge of
this question, both Mouffe and Laclau (whether writing together or
separately) will inevitably rst invoke the anti-essentialism which they
see as alone leaving the genuine possibility for political life: they argue
that political movements can gain their identity only through some one
of the particular or partial identities that combine to make up a
movement. Thus, for example, the identity of anti-tsarist forces in
Russia could come only from some sub-group in the struggle; for
example, the workers who struck, demanding higher wages. The
name and content of the movement would then derive from the
hegemonization produced by this group (Butler, Laclau and Z
izek,
2000: 3023).
There is nothing necessaryabout the assumption of this identity, nor
will this identity necessarily affect future identities or ones constructed
in other contexts. Since there is no utopian end of history, we must
get beyond the illusion that political movements tend logically toward
the realization of a single, universal vision. Such a transcendence of tra-
ditional essentialism precisely leaves room to imagine the efcacy of the
disparate and often unrelated identity movements of the new left. In
other words, the pluralizing response to our query about the radical
democratic imaginary is absolutely vital to Laclau and Mouffes defense
of such movements.
But, at a second moment, things are not as simple as this plural-
ization of the universal its dependence upon particular articulations
would lead us to believe; for both Mouffe and Laclau immediately
articulate quasi-transcendental conditions for these very pluralizing
operations to take place, for the left to form new visions: and the trans-
parency of these conditions to a given society begins to reimport some-
thing like a utopian telos into the discourse of Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy and later texts. We could explain the rst of these conditions
with regard to the example of anti-tsarism cited above: the passage by
Laclau in which this discussion is embedded includes an intermediary
187
step which Laclau claims is the very condition of the universalization
of the particular struggles of various groups. What makes possible the
articulation of an equivalence between otherwise unrelated struggles
is the presence of a frontier separating . . . [the tsars] regime from the
rest of society (Butler, Laclau and Z
izek, 2000: 302). In other words,

the possession of a common enemy serves as condition for the possi-
bility for the joining of various groups to create a movement.
This positing of enmity as transcendental is particularly apparent in
Chantal Mouffes appropriation of a key term in Hegemony antagon-
ism. This concept is in fact derived from the political philosophy of the
German political philosopher Karl Schmitt, who intends the term to
mean that every collective identity implies an opposed other (the
antagonist). For Mouffe, such a politicized conception of the social
is an irreducible element in the formation of the radical democratic
imaginary; for it is only through the formation of such concrete
antagonism that social movements can gain the rhetorical appeal to
becomemass movements. As Mouffe translates this insight, she tells us
that
Political life concerns collective, public action; it aims at the construction
of a we in a context of diversity and conict. But to construct a we it
must be distinguished from the them, and that means establishing a
frontier, dening an enemy. (Mouffe, 1993: 69)
Now, while this Schmittian conception of antagonism is useful for resist-
ing various contemporary efforts to underwrite a politics of the trans-
parent society (Habermas comes to mind), we must be careful not to
transform it from an implicit precondition for democratic vision into
the vision itself. Laclau and Mouffe (though, as will be seen, they may
have erred to irt with Schmitt at all) cannot be taken to embrace a new
fascism of struggle. At the very most, they will argue that struggle (and
only non-violent struggle at that) is not to be avoided. They will never
idealize it.
The same should not be said, however, of another implicit precon-
dition of the radical democratic imaginary the openness of identity
itself. If the fundamental insight underlying the fall of Marxism is the
lack of a universal identity and end of history, this insight, when applied
also to individual and society, serves as more than historical precondition
for the emergence of a new theory. More strongly, the impossibility of
closing social identity (the identity of a person, a people, a group or a
nation) justies asserting the ultimately political nature of all societies.
Neither can I ever nally know who I am nor we ever nally know who
we are: indeed, the reason for this impossibility is that identity is inde-
terminant. There is no complete identity either for individual, group or
society. Politics takes place in the undetermined interstices of social
188
identity. To say that society is structurally prevented from knowing or
being itself is just to say that identity is a matter of political struggle
rather than of some kind of deduction. And that assertion of openness,
in turn, serves as another condition for the possibility of the formation
of particular social imaginaries today.
This transcendental can and does become at least part (the general
form?) of the radical democratic imaginary. In effect, the democratic
revolution that Laclau and Mouffe (following Claude Lefort) identify
with modernity itself involves a self-realization of the truth of societys
lack of truth. In a sense the historical particularity of the radical demo-
cratic imaginary just refers to the various guises in which the ideal of
a society (and an individuality marked by such a society) radically open
to ceaseless redenition can emerge. As Laclau puts it, a consciousness
of the impossibility of identity can be important for democratic politics
in that it involves the institutionalization of [a societys] own openness
and, in that sense, the injunction to identify with its own impossibility
(Butler, Laclau and Z
izek, 2000: 199). Laclau calls for democratic

societies to construct an ideal or imaginary identity of precisely that
indetermination that opens the space of the political.
II With friends like this, who needs enemies? Z
izek on
antagonism
In several texts written in and after 1987, Z
izek has developed a critique

of Laclau and Mouffes work that calls into question their very project.
The key here is Z
izeks appropriation of a term we have already seen

from Hegemony antagonism. While this concept is derived from
Schmitt, who intends the term to mean that every collective identity
implies an opposed other (the antagonist), within both Hegemony and
Z
izeks writing, the term takes on a very different meaning: the antag-
onistic Other also names the absence or void that emerges where we
expect to nd the term completing any identity. Understood in this way,
antagonism does not point to the inevitability of struggle in a fashion
pushing us in the proto-fascist direction of Schmitt and social Darwin-
ists but to a radical heterogeneity. The Other can never be reduced to
an other, can never be only a particular being. Being itself is punctured
by non-being and it is this punctuation at the location of the term rep-
resenting the whole that is the true antagonist both in Hegemony and
in Z
izeks understanding. In other words, the truth of society is that its

identity does not exist. As Laclau himself puts it, the point of antagon-
ism is the impossibility of Society.
8
Z
izeks critique of Laclau and Mouffe is that the profound insight

represented by antagonism entirely subverts the anti-essentialism and
189
conventionalist historicism of Hegemony and subsequent texts. In a
critical essay about Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Beyond Discourse
Analysis,
9
Z
izek leads us to this conclusion through a consideration of

the apparently innocent question of the relationship between antagon-
ism and the theory of the subject in Laclau and Mouffes book.
10
The
argument is that antagonism undercuts the texts insufciently radical-
ized vision of the subject of the political. Hegemony remains beholden,
argues Z
izek, to an Althusserian vision of the subject, one which con-

ceives of society as constructed of various subject-positions each of
which brings its own point of view on political matters. Such a vision
of the political, however, implicitly already substantializessociety sug-
gesting a master viewpoint of the social itself, a viewpoint from which
all the discourses of the subject-positions are exposed as limited and
ideological. Antagonism, on the other hand, disallows the constitution
of society as substantial.
In order to see the devastating nature of Z
izeks apparently friendly

critique, it is vital to understand that the problem with subject-
positions is by no means accidental to the approach of Hegemony as a
whole: or, to put the same point in different words, one has to under-
stand the bond between antagonism and that truth that Hegemony
would otherwise conventionalize. The thought experiment in Beyond
Discourse Analysis is simple and effective: Z
izek asks us to consider the

effect that the insight of antagonism might itself have upon the eld of
political action. With the knowledgethat to construct a we it must
be distinguished from the them , the political agent is freed from more
than the illusion that her or his society might achieve a nal or utopian
identity: rather, we know that even if the concrete other facing me (the
capitalist if I am a worker, the lord if I am a slave, etc.) were to dis-
appear, another would take his or her place. As a result, Z
izek writes:
to grasp the notion of antagonism in its most radical dimension, we
should invert the relationship between the two terms: it is not the
external enemy who is preventing me from achieving identity with
myself, but every identity is already in itself blocked, marked by an
impossibility (Laclau, 1990: 2512).
Strangely enough, antagonism as Z
izek interprets it actually

judges this other (the capitalist, the lord, etc.) innocent; for he or she is
a mere token or representative of the Other. In truth, even were she or
he not there, we would fail to achieve identity with ourselves. Another
other would take her or his place. That impossibility is inscribed in the
very structure of self-representation, wherein every identity remains
insufcient to the subject it masks. That is, when we decide that we
really are Jews (Nazis, etc.) or even that we really are contingent, open
beings, we refuse the practical imperative implicit in antagonism an
imperative to refuse the independence and nality of any substantial
190
identity. The truth of antagonism can therefore be translated into an
assertion that the socio-symbolic eld is . . . structured around a certain
traumatic impossibility, around a ssure which cannot be symbolized
(Laclau, 1990: 249).
Because it posits as an ideal the identity of openness, identity politics,
even and especially an identity politics valorizing open identication,
necesarily does violence to the truth of antagonism, to antagonism as
truth. To the extent that the openness that is its precondition gives
content to the radical democratic imaginary, the politics that emerges
from it will miss out on the radically critical nature of antagonism.
II: 1
Wherein does this critical potential reside? It is important to start here
with Z
izeks sustained polemic directed at the various kinds of histori-

cism popular within the academic world today and reected, as well,
in Laclau and Mouffes anti-essentialism. Far from encouraging the
conventionalism of Laclau and Mouffes poststructuralist polemics,
antagonism amounts to a concrete and even practical experience of a
certain universal truth, a truth unlimited by the conventions of any
particular culture: at the core of all social systems producing identities
is a certain structure, a structure that alone makes possible the for-
mation of diacritical or articulated identities. But this truth will be of
such a nature as always to refuse any usefulness, always to evade pro-
jection within an imaginary structure. As Z
izek articulates his own

position (through that of Lacan) in another context, he accepts the
deconstructionist motif of radical contingency, but turns this motif
against itself, using it to assert his commitment to Truth as contingent.
11
These last words are vital, though, as they indicate the essential
difference not only between Z
izek and other radical democratic

theorists but also between Z
izek and traditional universalists or struc-

turalists. Laclau and Mouffe themselves will embrace the universality
of antagonism (precisely as a defense of their anti-essentialism). What
differentiates Z
izeks approach from theirs is the fact that the universal

or structure discovered by Z
izeks analyses will always contain the

paradox of its own impossibility (truth/necessity as contingent, etc.)
within itself.
Such ironic or even aporeitic writing will never morph into a con-
ventionalist position; for such a position formalizes (and, thus, totalizes)
the content of its own assertions precisely in denying all totality and all
truth. In effect, it is inevitable that conventionalist anti-essentialism ends
up eliding the risk of antagonism. Z
izeks political theory is rst of all

inspired by the necessity of protecting/exposing this contingency at the
basis of the social. As he writes, the impossibility at work in Laclaus
191
notion of antagonism is double: not only does radical antagonism
mean that it is impossible adequately to represent/articulate the fullness
of society on an even more radical level, it is also impossible ade-
quately to represent/articulate this very antagonism/negativity that
prevents Society from achieving its full ontological realization (Butler,
Laclau and Z
izek, 2000: 100).

As to how to project a contingency so radical that it refuses to be
hypostatized as content or form, Z
izeks answer, repeated throughout

his work, marries the Hegelian notion of a concrete universal with the
Lacanian notion of the Real. Antagonism punctures the very rift
between form and content by simultaneously appearing at both levels.
Paradoxically, truth always emerges both as a particular content the
problematic site of social denition/exclusion, the dening historical
moment, etc. and as the universal form/horizon for making possible
all those particular contents. In this peculiar double function, antagon-
ism challenges all pictures of society, including the one produced in
asserting that there is no picture of society; for it insists on re-binding
the form with the particular content that produces it. More systemati-
cally, the point will always be both that the particular content is uni-
versal (that it is not merely some particular and limited point of view)
and that the universal form is particular (that it is not simply a neutral
universality but one embraced from a particular social/political world).
The structuration of society by antagonism refers to this fundamental
and also impossible instability of historical/social truth with regard to
its own status. As Z
izek likes to put it, every particular viewpoint

brings with it its own universal: each particular position, in order to
articulate itself, involves the (implicit or explicit) assertion of its own
mode of universality (Butler, Laclau and Z
izek, 2000: 315).

Herein lies the debt of Z
izeks political thought to his psychoanalytic

master, Lacan:
Lacans final lesson is not the relativity and plurality of truths but the
hard, traumatic fact that in every concrete constellation truth is bound to
emerge in some contingent detail. In other words, although truth is context-
dependent although there is no truth in general, but always the truth of
some situation there is none the less in every plural field a particular
point which articulates its truth and as such cannot be relativized; in this
precise sense, truth is always One. (Z
izek, 1991: 196)

II: 2
What is most compelling in Z
izeks critique of anti-essentialism is the

way that it allows him an entree into concrete social phenomena that
now appear as symptoms of a truth repressed by the over-certainty of
conventionalism. In effect, Z
izek re-engages a kind of ideology critique

192
with regard to contemporary social and political formations. According
to Z
izek, projecting open identity as social ideal and thereby suppress-

ing antagonism leads to conceiving the concrete other of openness
the nationalist, the fundamentalist, the fascist as a traditional political
enemy, one who could be nitely overcome. The passionate battle
against various forms of nationalism or fundamentalism that charac-
terizes so much of Left thought today amounts to a blindness about
the bond between modern society and its anti-modern other (Z
izek,
1994: 222). To see this bond, raise the question again: What would
happen if the antagonistic other [in this case, fundamentalism or
nationalism] were to be defeated? The hidden assumption of such
battles is that the open society which those on the left defend could
survive unchanged the vanquishment of all closed identities. The
society that provides the horizon for a kind of subjectivity whose highest
value is radically open, contingent, and incomplete identity thus
imagines itself as free of the limitation imposed by antagonism. No
Other limits this societys choice of identity.
For Z
izek, this self-contradiction manifests itself, not in some kind

of formalistic or theoretical cul de sac, but rather in the peculiar vehe-
mence within the postmodern world of precisely those terroristic funda-
mentalisms that mark the global political landscape. They are, as it
were, symptomatic formations indicating the contradiction between
liberal/left pluralism (the belief in the impossibility of utopian totality,
the necessity of different perspectives, etc.) and the hidden belief that
they have found (in the fundamentalist, anti-modernist) the true enemy,
the other who is really the Other, so as to be able to project precisely
such utopian closure through that others negation. And, as a result, it
is the universalist illusion, an illusion in which Laclau and Mouffes
radical democratic imaginary necessarily, despite all protests to the
contrary, takes part, that spawns the return of the repressed of fascism,
nationalism, etc. The price of reviving even a limited utopianism as
not only Laclau and Mouffes theory but the predominant liberal dis-
courses of today all implicitly do is a stoking of the res that Laclau
and Mouffe seem most bent upon extinguishing. The ideal of the
democratic imaginary is directly (if inversely) related to the peculiar
virulence of all the contemporary terrorist identities resisting this
vision.
Moreover, it is not simply at the level of society that the repressed
return: for Z
izek, the hypocrisy of a kind of relativist universalism at

work in todays left spawns symptomatic behavior patterns on the part
of the leftists themselves. Here Z
izek zeros in on the kind of sympto-

matic puritanical behavior we associate with the culture wars in the
USA in the 1980s and 1990s. Z
izek forces us to see that the kind of pc

politics radical democratic theory implies suffers from its own signicant
193
chauvinism. The symptom of the Others repression behind the screen
of the other is the constant discovery by contemporary leftists of new
forms of discrimination. Such discovery is in fact necessary to maintain
the apparent naturalness or reality of the open ideal. That is, the
utopianism of the critic can be supported only so long as (1) the factual
opposition between the idealized identity and a concrete other and (2)
the illusion that this other could be defeated (since otherwise we are
confronted with the indestructible Other) are both present. And this is
precisely what political correctness accomplishes, with its ever advan-
cing battles for more minuscule forms of identity and against ever more
subtle forms of discrimination. With pc, there will always be another
hyphen to add to dead-white-heterosexual-male, etc., in order to
maintain the battle against discrimination. But, also, this battle will
always appear to bewinnable: one more hidden form of discrimination
and, maybe well have licked the problem. Thus, for Z
izek, the pc
attitude is an exemplary case of the Sartrean mauvaise foi of the intel-
lectuals: it provides new and newer answers in order to keep the
problem alive (Z
izek, 1994: 214).

II: 3
Within Marxism, ideology is not simply false consciousness nor even
false consciousness accompanied by symptoms of its falsity; the full effect
of ideology demands a false consciousness that masks social reality. And
that is exactly what Z
izek proposes that the anti-essentialism of Laclau

and Mouffe does.
Recall that Hegemony marks the climax of an ongoing historical
critique of Marxist essentialism on the left. Laclau and Mouffes work
is typical of this critical tendency opposing traditional leftism by reject-
ing the economism of rigid Marxist theory; Laclau and Mouffe rmly
reject the reduction of social change to the material dimension of the
economy. Reductivist theory whether of the later Engels or of Lenin
and the Soviets always crashes up against the problem of subjective
intervention, always reduces social change to a predetermined unfold-
ing of historical forces that only problematically leaves room for even
revolutionary intervention. Reacting against this kind of Marxism,
Laclau and Mouffe embrace Gramscis hegemony as alternative.
Hegemony, at least when taken as an anti-realism, suggests a vision of
society in which any and all explanations of social change theoretically
enjoy equal privilege when considered independently of the intervention
of social/political discourses. Thus, precisely their opposition to a reduc-
tive materialism leads the authors of Hegemony to substitute for it a
kind of anti-essentialist vision of society as pastiche of viewpoints and
identities to propose the multiculturalist picture.
194
At least at a rst pass, Z
izeks project seems much closer to reduc-

tivist Marxism in its insistence upon the priority of capitalist economics
in explaining the constitution of the contemporary social world. This
is, indeed, where Z
izeks underscoring of the concrete universal really

comes into focus; for precisely the problem with the multiculturalist
picture is that it suggests that no factor in social development has
explanatory priority. The concrete universal, on the contrary, suggests
that it is precisely through the priority of a particular element that the
universal is formed and emerges. And, it suggests such a priority in a
way that in fact avoids the determinism of Marxist orthodoxy for the
element prioritized, swinging between form and content, universal and
particular, lacks the ontological consistency of a reductivist materialism.
Z
izek thus writes in response to Laclaus work:

My point of contention with Laclau . . . is that I do not accept that all
elements which enter into hegemonic struggle are in principle equal: in the
series of struggles (economic, political, feminist, ecological, ethnic, etc.)
there is always one which, while it is part of the chain, secretly overdeter-
mines its very horizon. This contamination of the universal by the particu-
lar is stronger than the struggle for hegemony (i.e. for which particular
content will hegemonize the universality in question): it structures in
advance the very terrain on which the multitude of particular contents ght
for hegemony. (Butler, Laclau and Z
izek, 2000: 320)

And, of course, it is the economic element that will enjoy this priority
for Z
izek. Z
izeks deduction of this priority for the material derives

from his observation of what the multiculturalist picture of society
excludes. For all the thinkers efforts to pose as radicals, the thought of
todays radical democratic theorists lacks radicalism and testies to this
lack; for the implicit initial gesture of this thought, no less than tra-
ditional liberal ideologies, is a certain renunciation and acceptance.
It is, namely, the renunciation of the idea of a global change in the
fundamental relations in our society. One could almost add as a
preamble to every radical democratic intervention today: given that
we cant and wont change the economic system that denes social
relationships, this is the most that we can do . . . Thus, as Z
izek writes,
the acceptance of the liberal democratic capitalist framework . . .
remains the same, the unquestioned background, in all the proliferation
of new (postmodern) subjectivities (Butler, Laclau and Z
izek, 2000: 321).

Effectively, todays theoretical anti-essentialism is nothing less than
a mode of such renunciation, a mask for the sublime operations of
techno-capitalism. Z
izeks theoretical position gains its saliency by con-

demning the oft-observed tendency of contemporary social and political
thought to eschew (or, to eschew even the possibility of) grappling with
the broadest forces determining life-worlds. In this sense, Z
izeks theory
195
amounts to an attempt to rescue political thought from the obscuran-
tism and abstraction that have marked so much of contemporary
academic discourse.
The end of the path Z
izek opens in Beyond Discourse Analysis,

then, seems to be a broad and devastating rejection of both the causes
(the new social movements) and the theoretical position embraced by
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Laclau and Mouffe stand accused
(albeit gently, indirectly) of being ideologues. One must, on this basis,
wonder what kind of alliance is really possible between Laclau and
Mouffe on the one hand and Z
izek on the other or between discourse

analysis and Lacanian political theory in general. A careful reading of
the texts involved seems to indicate that, in truth, the friends here are
really enemies or should be.
III Chiasmus: utopia vs. ideology critique
Ideology is not only a utopian project of social transformation with no real-
istic chance of actualization; no less ideological is the anti-utopian stance
of those who realistically devalue every global project of social trans-
formation as utopian, that is, as unrealistic dreaming and/or harbouring
totalitarian potential: todays predominant form of ideological closure
takes the precise form of mental block which prevents us from imagining
fundamental social change, in the interests of an allegedly realistic and
mature attitude.
12
One might say, at a rst pass, that between Mouffe and Laclau on the
one hand and Z
izek on the other hand we see a sharing out of the shards

of Marxist critical theory. At its fullest, say in the hands of a thinker
like Herbert Marcuse or Jrgen Habermas, critical Marxism historically
combines a vision of a transformed society with the exposure and criti-
cism of ideology (the falsity of truth-claims distorted by social position).
Indeed, utopia, within this tradition, could be said to be nothing other
than attainment of a social state where the contradictions productive of
ideology would no longer exist. Now we nd the radical democratic
theory of Laclau and Mouffe inheriting the utopian moment and the
psychoanalytic theory of Z
izek taking up ideology critique.

But such a position would seem to imply a kind of political pes-
simism or even quietism on Z
izeks part. His half of critical theory

demands sacrice of precisely the residual utopianism that can inspire
coordinated political action, to use Habermass phrase. Read in that
way, Z
izeks work would be continuous with the position of the late

Adorno a reasoned pessimism about the contemporary possibility of
transformative practice combined with a retrieval of the knowledge
generated by critique.
196
Interestingly, however, Z
izek anticipates such a reading of his work

and, particularly in his more recent writings, has been at some pains to
refute it. He casts considerable derision at those who engage in the
masochistic ritual of denouncing the totalitarian potential of [the
lefts] past arguing that such a theoretical position simply works to the
benet of conformist dwarfs whose self-complacency triumphs in
todays scoundrel time over Leftist utopianism (1991: 270). And
while before the past couple of years one could maintain that the lack
of any sustained political directives within Z
izeks work argued for the

impossibility of constructing any substitute utopia, given his insight,
the appearance in 1999 of The Ticklish Subject disallows such a view.
As Z
izek himself writes, The Ticklish Subject is beneath its philo-

sophical surface as a defense of a radicalized Cartesianism rst and
foremost an engaged political intervention, addressing the burning
question of how we are to reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist political
project in our era of global capitalism and its ideological supplement,
liberal-democratic multiculturalism (Z
izek, 1999: 4).

In this spirit, but as an extension of what he is really committed to,
Z
izek even goes so far as to endorse Laclau and Mouffes call for a new
radical democratic imaginary.
13
In other words, despite the link that
he himself has revealed between the imaginary projection of utopian
contents and ideology, Z
izek underwrites the need for somenew impulse

toward radical social change.
III: 1
To understand why Z
izek does not consider himself a pessimist, we must

consider his fragment of critical theory (ideology critique) to be more
than a shard. Z
izek, in fact, returns to a revised version of Marxs own

theory of history. Beginning with the Communist Manifestoof 1848 and
continuing through the Anti-Dhring, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
explained the program of Marxist communism in contrast to the
utopian socialism of their predecessors. While the earlier socialists
invariably depended upon a utopian or abstract negation of present
conditions to provide content to their vision of a transformed society,
Marx and Engels questioned precisely the efcacy of such an image.
Above all, what they called into question was the radicality of such
utopianism: in effect any vision of a transformed world produced from
withinsuch a society necessarily carries within itself the limited historical
situation of the visionary. Thus, for Marx and Engels, no radical demo-
cratic imaginary (to use the term favored by Laclau and Mouffe) is
possible at present. But this assertion is, of course, not meant to
forswear the possibility of revolutionary transformation. Quite the
contrary, the impossibility of utopia is embraced precisely in order to
197
make room for the possibility of revolution. The impossibility of a
utopia is the potential for radical critique and radical change.
Z
izek revives the argument form introduced by Marx and Engels in

their critique of their socialist predecessors. Effectively, Z
izeks response
to Laclau, Mouffe and other postmodern political theorists is to deny
the coherence of a political thought predicated upon the possibility of
projecting a utopia unclouded by the prejudices of the society occupied
by the theorist. But, like Marx and Engels too, this critique is not meant
to forswear the possibility of a revolutionary transformation. Quite the
contrary, the impossibility of utopia is embraced in both cases precisely
in order to make room for the possibility of radical social transform-
ation. Seen in parallel to the Marxist condemnation of parochial social-
ism, Z
izeks anti-utopianism is in kind fundamentally different from the

form of it constructed against the foil of an ever threatening totali-
tarianism, the form that animates the renunciation of radicalism in
contemporary political thought.
14
But, while Z
izeks Marx, we must recall, is not the Marx of the

Second International it is also not the Marx of May 68, the utopian
Marx revived in the light of the Paris Manuscripts. The fact of con-
temporary experience from which Z
izeks political analyses take ight

is the constriction of the political imagination that differentiates our era
from previous ones. Whether we speak of the radical theorists of
academe or of liberal politicians, todays public discourse is unique in
modern history in its inability to make the determining conditions under
which we live worthy of question. But this withering of the imaginary
is not simply a mistake or even avoidable. In a moment of brutal
honesty, Z
izek admits in The Ticklish Subject that maybe it is not really

possible, at least not in the foreseeable future to undermine the global
capitalist system because we cannot imagine any alternative to it (Z
izek,
1999: 352).
What is possible, as it was possible for Marx and Engels, is to project,
from a position immanent to the society of global capitalism, the emerg-
ence of concrete contradictions. And that is precisely what Z
izek, at least
in recent texts, offers us as partial replacement of such a democratic
imaginary. Global capitalism is sliding into the crisis that Marx and
Engels predicted for its industrial forebear. Thus, Z
izek writes,
. . . far from accepting the New World Order as an inexorable process
which allows only for moderate palliative measures, I continue to think, in
the old Marxist vein, that todays capitalism, in its very triumph, is
breeding new contradictions which are potentially even more explosive
than those of standard industrial capitalism. A series of irrationalities
immediately comes to mind: the result of the breathtaking growth of
productivity in the last few decades is rising unemployment, with the
productivity the long-term perspective that developed societies will need
198
only 20 per cent of their workforce to reproduce themselves, with the
remaining 80 per cent reduced to the status of a surplus from a purely
economic point of view; the result of decolonization is that multinationals
treat even their own country of origin as just another colony; the result of
globalization and the rise of the global village is the ghettoization of whole
strata of the population; the result of the much-praised disappearance of
the working class is the emergence of millions of manual workers labour-
ing in the Third World sweatshops, out of our delicate Western sight. . . .
The capitalist system is thus approaching its inherent limit and self-can-
cellation: for the majority of the population, the dream of the virtual fric-
tionless capitalism (Bill Gates) is turning into a nightmare in which the
fate of millions is decided in hyper-reexive speculation on futures. (Butler,
Laclau and Z
izek, 2000: 322)

While Z
izek will refrain from constructing a determinist theory of

history predicting the inevitable downfall of the capitalist system, he
does nd a crisis immanent within the apparently smooth workings of
the new capitalism. As I write these words, the United States has just
been disturbed by the events of 11 September 2001 and declared a war
on terrorism a war that, in its ambition to wipe out the very threat
of terror, promises precisely the kind of crisis that is implied by the con-
tradictions Z
izek points out. The hope implicit in Z
izeks writing, like

the hope locked into Marxist dialectical materialism, is that the crisis
implicit in capitals contradictions will broadly reveal the essential
questionability of social forms that otherwise appear to be inevitable
within available political discourses. Only as the result of such a revel-
ation can there be a real shift in the very terrain of politics. But today
such a shift does, suddenly, appear as at least possiblein ways that even
in August of 2001 it did not seem to be. In this shifting of the landscape,
we detect which remains of optimism can survive the demise of the
radical democratic imaginary.
III: 2
The bond that I am implying between Z
izek and the Marxist critique

of utopian socialism might be extended still further. Recall how the
rejection of Marxism in post 68 European thought went hand in hand
with a new language of political revolution, a language that conceived
it in terms of the radical contingency of the present. Typically, the hope
for a transformed society was conceived by radically rethinking his-
toricity, wrenching it away from the teleologies of historical reason
popular since Hegel. Symptomatic in this regard was The Mirror of
Production, Jean Baudrillards 1972 Auseinandersetzungwith Marxism.
In that text, Baudrillard criticized Marx and Engelss polemic against
utopian socialism, claiming that precisely as unscientic the utopians
199
(and not the Marxists) represented what (in 1972) remained viable in
radical political discourse:
The cursed poet, non-ofcial art, and utopian writings in general, by giving
a current and immediate content to mans liberation, should be the very
speech of communism, its direct prophecy. They are only its bad conscience
precisely because in them something of man is immediately realized, because
they object without pity to the political dimension of the revolution, which
is merely the dimension of its nal postponement. They are the equivalent,
at the level of discourse, of the savage social movements that were born in
a symbolic situation of rupture (symbolic, which means non-universalized,
non-dialectical, non-rationalized in the mirror of an imaginary objective
history). This is why poetry (not Art) was fundamentally connected only
with the utopian socialist movements, with revolutionary romanticism,
and never with Marxism as such. It is because the content of liberated man
is, at bottom, of less importance than the abolition of the separation of the
present and the future. The abolition of this form of time, the dimension
of sublimation, makes it impossible to pardon the idealists of the dialectic,
who are at the same time the realists of politics.
15
What remains of utopia here in Baudrillard is a contentless expansion
of the present into the future, an expansion which is conceived as
poetic. Utopian thought is poetic (i.e. symbolic in the sense intro-
duced by Mauss and Bataille) insofar as it can never be drained of the
symbolic material by which it is articulated (the discourses, stories,
experiments, etc.) and reduced to abstract meaning. In this way it sub-
stitutes a hope beyond hopes or ideals (conceived as meanings), thus
challenging precisely the meansends structure of rationalist discourse.
Utopian discourse does not simply place an ideal at another time or
place like a carrot dangling from a stick. Rather for Baudrillard
utopianism the utopianism of the non-scientic ones abolishes
the separation of the present and the future precisely by making the
proposed future present in its discourse. To the extent that utopian
writing aims to inspire or to make vivid its vision it is more than
science.
This expanded present underwritten by the materiality of discourse
is, of course, precisely not political in the traditional sense implying
concrete and specic institutions, etc. Baudrillard calls his residual
utopianism poetic in contrasting it with the political dimension of
the revolution. That is, this utopian vision cannot be conceived as a
political end, since it is precisely such teleological historicity that the
poetic resists. As a result, then, Baudrillards utopianism is only
utopian (in the tradition of Plato and Thomas More) in a vestigial
sense: it refuses to project a state that could act as the goal of political
life but attempts instead to recast such life from within. No state is
hoped for but rather the stateless between of all states.
200
III: 3
What is interesting about Z
izeks work is that it both accepts this anti-

teleological recasting of utopia and refuses Baudrillards rehabilitation
of utopian socialism. Z
izek can take such a position because he applauds

the desubstantialization of utopia implied by its interpretation as
present while refusing the immanence inherent in the utopian ideal
embraced by Baudrillard and numerous other French thinkers since
1968.
16
What he accepts is that, as an event, utopia is neither an idea
nor even a substance but rather the momentary rupture of systematicity
itself. For Z
izek, the problem with the discourse of revolutionary event

is its tendency despite the critique of teleology that it implies to
fetishizethe present, to recast it, precisely as Baudrillard intends, as aes-
thetic object. Such a fetishization, however, exactly defeats the very
virtue of the critique of utopian teleology. That about revolution which
makes it through the lter of the present is precisely what suits the
commodication of everyday life, what seems to blunt the harrow of
radical transformation into an instrument of pleasure. The revolution-
ary event is reduced to a non-threatening happening to an invigo-
rating life experience (in German an Erlebnis) that can be packaged
and repeated in various forms. One need hardly tell again here the
familiar story of the fate of the 1960s in the 1970s when the sexual
revolution became the promise of promiscuity, when ecological con-
sciousness became Earth Day, and when the projects of political
liberation became consciousness-raising. What survives when the
revolution becomes aestheticized is precisely what suits such contem-
porary lmic visions of the 1960s as Austin Powers or That Thing You
Do what can be easily packaged as commodity.
What allows the utopia of the present to be thus fetishized? Effec-
tively, the falsity of the position it implies. In For They Know Not What
They Do, Z
izek argues that the moment of transition between symbolic

systems, the moment constitutive of the system from without, does not
really exist in the sense of a possible appearance at all; or, it exists
only as it operates within the constituted system. Z
izek uses the

Freudian/Lacanian idea of deferred action (Nachtrglichkeit) to explain
this, reminding us of Freuds case of the Wolfman for whom the trauma
of witnessing as infant a parental coitus a tergo is at rst no trauma at
all. There was simply no symbolic system, no language which it could
disrupt. Z
izek reminds us that it was only years later, with the further
elaboration of the childs sexual theories , that it acquired its trau-
matic status: only at this later stage did it become possible for the child
to do something with it , to t it into a symbolic frame in the form
of a traumatic wound (1991: 222).
Now, precisely because of deferred action, the model presented by
the political theorists of the event proves wrong: Z
izek suggests that we

201
must reverse the common-sense idea of a spontaneous and free present
opposed to the omnipotent backward gaze of the historian. This,
because
the logic of Freuds deferred action does not consist in the subsequent
gentrication of a traumatic encounter by means of its transformation
into a normal component of our symbolic universe, but in the almost exact
opposite of it something that was at rst perceived as a meaningless,
neutral event changes retroactively, after the advent of a new symbolic
network determines the subjects place of enunciation, into a trauma that
cannot be integrated into this network. (1991: 221)
Deferred action thereby allows Z
izek to redene the utopian

moment in his own thought. Having apparently ascribed to a utopia of
the event as embraced by many of his generation, Z
izek subtracts out

from that utopia the theory of historicity that usually lends allure to
such a vision. Z
izek aims his political theory directly away from experi-

ence of the present. The hope in Z
izek is not that individuals will be

able to live more fully by remaining in the immediacy of present life.
As we have seen, that hopeis precisely the lure fed to us by late capi-
talism the wish that the radical democratic imaginary of Laclau and
Mouffe ideologizes. Under the lens of Nachtrglichkeit, we are forced to
revise our understanding of present and event, to de-substantialize
them and redene them relationally. That is, the event gains its import-
ance only in the way that it refashions past and future, that it ruptures
the certainties of systematized understanding.
The uncovering of the primordial trauma ready to transform history
is the genuinely revolutionary possibility, what Z
izek refers to as the

act by which the universality of the symbolic system is forced open to
allow freedom.
17
If we can speak of a utopian ideal or purpose here
it is precisely not the presence of the present but rather the moment of
critical labor, the act by which traumatic primary repression is
made/allowed to transform a social/political world. If the moment
survives as something upon which to set our hopes, it is only as an eccen-
tric site for a kind of work only, rst, as pointing beyond itself to an
origin to which, second, the critic must rebind it. Doubly armored
against reduction to a fetish, the revolutionary moment escapes the
reliability of the image.
Indeed, in its goal of metamorphosing historical understanding,
the labor of the act is closer to a retrospective knowledge than a
happening, a knowledge which uncovers the contingency of decisions
already made and thus produces a revolution. This, no doubt, allows a
certain inspirational function to Z
izeks discourse: indeed, one can even

say that he does encouragesomething like a revolutionary moment. But
the justication for such encouragement lies not in any experiencebut
202
rather in the transformation one hopes to generate to such an extent
that we must value equally non-revolutionary situations that nonethe-
less expose the truth of identity. Z
izeks work aims at the fullest possible

exposure of the self-deceptions by which every society, every culture,
constitutes itself as such. Especially at moments of crisis and change,
both past and future can be pushed to deliver up the freedomthey hide.
Thus, the transcendental priority of the gap of subjectivity, its
revolutionary constitution of all that is, does not imply the possibility
that such a gap might stand by itself as image of a transformed world.
Indeed, it is such a way of putting the limitation of utopia in Z
izek that
points us toward what I take to be the unacknowledged fulcrum of his
overall critical position: his political theory can protect a certain hope
for radical change indeed, depending upon how one uses that word,
a vision of such transformation but its precise limit is the imaginary
that Mouffe and Laclau and even Z
izek himself at unguarded moments

use to name it. We may entertain hope, but it is precisely not a new
imaginary, radically democratic or otherwise.
I should emphasize here that Z
izek himself does not make this dis-

tinction, that, at this point, I turn from explication to critique of his
work. My argument, moreover, pertains to more than a couple of
passages where Z
izek (wrongly, from my point of view) endorses Laclau

and Mouffes assignment to contemporary political theory of the task
of formulating precisely such an imaginary. Z
izeks ambition in The

Ticklish Subject and more recent texts of reformulating a leftist, anti-
capitalist political project (Z
izek, 1999: 4) is clearly at the least pro-

grammatic and even apparently systematic. But political programs,
systems and manifestoes inevitably cross over into the sphere of the
imaginary. If such is the case and if I am right about the implications
of Z
izeks critique, then such ambitions transgress the limits that

Z
izeks own thought imposes. The imaginary is a boundary, I would

suggest, that forbids precisely the discursive forms that we usually
associate with the visionary aspect of political theory. When it is for-
bidden, no longer can theory generate the certainties of the program
or manifesto.
To understand this limitation requires expounding more precisely
the connotations of the term imaginary as it was rst formulated in
contemporary thought and as Z
izek wields it in Lacans psychoanalytic

usage.
18
Recall that, for Lacan, the limiting nature of imaginary life
derives from its false claim to binary closure. The infant before the
mirror in the famous mirror stage is able rst to control its motions
because the image offered to it seems nitely graspable.
19
On the other
hand, however, precisely the falsity of this self-sufciency, this closure
of the image, leads Lacan to locate the origins of aggression in the
infants relationship to the very image that empowers it. That is, the
203
imaginary is apparently structured in the manner of gestalt diagrams
by simple oppositions like that between gure and eld. What can be
imagined is precisely limited (as it is inspired) by the illusion of closure
that such binarism grants the person.
To recall the Lacanian understanding of the imaginary is to under-
stand the severe limits that Z
izeks thought imposes upon that vision-

ary function named both in Lefort and in Laclau and Mouffe by that
term. Political inspiration is possible, indeed vital, but it can only be the
inspiration of the critical act the act by which the event is put to
work in transforming the symbolic totality. The limit to Z
izeks thought
that I am suggesting here is not that it places too heavy a burden upon
the shoulders of abstract theorists as though criticism were only
accomplished by Z
izek and his scholarly colleagues. In one of Z
izeks
most powerful analyses of recent political events, he embraces the
position of the alternative left in the German revolution of 1989, the
Neues Forum. Here Z
izek praises the group for its search for a third

way between really existing socialism and capitalism. It turns out that
there was no such alternative, that the truth of the Neues Forumwas
precisely not what they thought it to be: nonetheless, claims Z
izek, the
projection of such an alternative amounted to an insistence upon that
trauma in social identity that otherwise disappeared. As Z
izek puts it,

the ction of a third way was the only point at which social antagon-
ism was not obliterated (Z
izek, 1994: 229).

The peculiarity of the German left in and after 1989 that it was
able to transform society only to the extent that it held onto an actually
false hope indicates both the political effectiveness of Z
izeks version
of critique and its limitations. On the one hand, within the sphere of
political action itself, the radicals in Neues Forumeffected precisely the
kind of revolutionary criticism that Z
izek embraces. Critique is not only

(or even primarily) the work of academics. On the other hand, the very
distortion imposed upon this critique (that it could discover the truth
of the political only through factual falsity) emblematizes the limitations
of a utopianism shorn of the imaginary. Utopia without the power of
the image: surely this is a thought entirely unable to achieve the mobiliz-
ing effects that Habermas has rightly sought in utopianism. Thus, while
we can certainly agree with Z
izek that his work provides an alternative

to the anti-utopianism so universal in todays political theory, we must
also insist that the strictures we must place on utopia here also prevent
it from being very effective. And perhaps that is why the reader is frus-
trated in efforts to nd the program announced by Z
izek in The
Ticklish Subject. The elliptical debates and readings that make up The
Ticklish Subject may help us to construct Z
izeks position, but they

hardly offer the radical democratic imaginary whose construction he
seems to promise.
204
I would give the last word here to none other than Ernesto Laclau,
who in a dialogue with Z
izek printed in Contingency, Hegemony, Uni-

versalityresponds to Z
izeks attack on his theory. He argues that Z
izeks
own position cannot really produce a coherent politics. Z
izeks attacks
on capitalism, Laclau claims, amount to empty talk without a vision
of an alternative to capitalism (Butler, Laclau and Z
izek, 2000: 206).

This is particularly the case for Laclau in the light of the historical failure
of the Marxist alternative: clearly Z
izek does not mean what Marx and

Engels meant by the end of capitalism, neither the dictatorship of the
proletariat nor the abolition of market mechanisms. But without his
meaning that or something equivalently imaginable, Z
izeks position
remains purely negative, purely a way of registering a discomfort
with the world as it is. Such a registration, however, cannot provide
more than a kind of voice in the wilderness. What, after all, does it
mean to be against capitalism if that suggests nothing about what one
would change in it or substitute for it? A theory unable to offer such a
substitution will be unable to connect with or articulate the concrete
struggles of oppressed individuals. The thing that empowers concrete
struggles, that allows them to grow and join with the political efforts
of others, is precisely a program, a vision of the future. Indeed, there
is, Laclau might well say, something narcissistic about the purity of
the intellectual position Z
izek stakes out classically unable to escape

from academic analysis to engage at a level of genuine solidarity
with social movements. This is not to reject Z
izeks critical position

which may provide the most trenchant analysis available today of
the reasons for the failure of contemporary Leftist politics but it is to
insist that, Z
izeks protests to the contrary, no clear path to the future

emerges from it.
Department of Philosophy, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY, USA
Notes
1 Much more common have been readings within the eld of Cultural Studies.
While many of these readings are quite interesting, they have largely evaded
the broader question of what Z
izek has to say about the political and about

political theory, remaining instead largely bound up with matters of lm
theory or, at broadest, questions about Lacan and feminism.
2 This association can be traced back to Z
izeks review of Laclau and

Mouffes Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in 1985 (La socit nexiste
pas, LAge, Paris, OctoberDecember 1985), but its most visible fruits
would have to be Laclaus preface to The Sublime Object of I deology,
205
PSC
published in a series edited by himself and Mouffe (London and New York:
Verso, 1989) and the inclusion of an essay of Z
izeks in Laclaus New

Reections on the Revolution of Our Time(1990). On this piece by Z
izek,
which is, in fact, a radical critique of Hegemony, see my discussion below.
3 See, for example, the introduction to Sublime, where Z
izek praises
Hegemony (and Mouffe and Laclaus work in general) as having produced
a political theory that is adequate to the challenge posed by totalitarianism:
It is the merit of Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe that they have, in
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, developed a theory of the social eld
founded on such a notion of antagonism on an acknowledgement of an
original trauma , an impossible kernel which resists symbolization, total-
ization, symbolic integration (Laclau, 1989: 56).
4 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985).
5 See, for example, Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 21921, Dominick
LaCapra, History, Theory, Trauma: Representing the Holocaust (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 206 and Anna Marie Smith, Laclau
and Mouffe: the Radical Democratic I maginary (London and New York:
Routledge, 1998), pp. 759.
6 Mouffe, The Return of the Political (1993).
7 Ernesto Laclau, Structure, History and the Political, in Butler, Laclau and
Z
izek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 2000: 211.

8 This phrase is rst used in Hegemony (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 125) and
becomes the title of a brief but important essay in Laclau, 1990: 8992.
9 The text, Beyond Discourse Analysis, was originally delivered at a
conference in 1987 at which Laclau and Mouffe were present. It is reprinted
as an appendix in Laclau, 1990.
10 Whenever we use the category of subject in this text, we will do so in
the sense of subject positions within a discursive structure (Laclau and
Mouffe, 1985: 115).
11 Z
izek, Tarrying with the Negative(1994: 4).

12 Slavoj Z
izek, Holding the Place (Butler, Laclau and Z
izek, 2000: 324).

13 ibid.: 325. The passage is worth quoting at some length: Today, in the face
of this Leftist knavery, it is more important than ever to hold this utopian
place of the global alternative open, even if it remains empty, living on
borrowed time, awaiting the content to ll it in. I fully agree with Laclau
that after the exhaustion of both the social democratic welfare state
imaginary and the really-existing-Socialist imaginary, the Left does need
a new imaginary (a new mobilizing global vision). Today, however, the
outdatedness of the welfare state and socialist imaginaries is a clich
the real dilemma is what to do with how the Left is to relate to the
predominant liberal democratic imaginary. It is my contention that Laclaus
and Mouffes radical democracy comes all too close to merely radicaliz-
ing this liberal democratic imaginary, while remaining within its horizon.
14 We have already seen how the structure Z
izek indicates through both the

Lacanian Real and the Hegelian concrete universal prevents any reduction
of Z
izeks Marx to the dumb coordinates of scientic socialism, to that

economic essentialism thoroughly repudiated by history. While this is not
206
the place to develop such an insight in any depth, it may be that themost
valuable service offered by Z
izeks political thought is a radical reinterpre-

tation of dialectical materialism, one that saves it from the sclerosis that
had been threatening it. There are numerous places in Z
izeks oeuvrewhere
he develops, at least provisionally, such a reading of the Marxist theory of
history. See, in particular, Z
izek, 1991: 25070 (where dialectical material-

ism is interpreted in terms of Freuds concept of Nachtrglichkeit), and Did
Somebody Say Totalitarianism(2001: 1903), where the status of economic
materiality is compared with the unconscious wish in Freuds Traumdeu-
tung.
15 Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, trans. with Introduction by
Mark Poster (St Louis: Telos Press, 1975), p. 164.
16 If one begins from the language of the expanded present or of the event
as substitute for a realist utopianism, one must see a broad stream of
European thought reaching back (before May 1968, to be sure) to Walter
Benjamin and forward to such contemporary thinkers as Alain Badiou,
Andrew Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.
17 See, for example, Chapter 4 of Z
izek, 2001: Melancholy and the Act.

18 While the imaginary invoked by Laclau, Mouffe and Z
izek derives
originally from Lacan, it stems more directly from Claude Lefort, who
sometimes uses it to mean simply the remainder of utopian vision after
utopias critique the inspirational or visionary element of political life.
Lefort, however, in admitting the provenance of such language in psycho-
analysis, also confesses to a loose appropriation of it. His imaginary is
not Lacans imaginary a sphere largely of paralysis and narcissism. See,
for example, his conation of imaginary and symbolic in his discussion
of Marx, The Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies, in The Political
Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed.
and intro. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 195.
19 See Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the
I and Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis, both reprinted in crits: a Selection,
trans. (from the French) by Alan Sheridan (New York and London: Norton,
1977).
Select bibliography
Butler, Judith, Laclau, Ernest and Z
izek, Slavoj (2000) Contingency, Hegemony,

Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London and New York:
Verso.
Laclau, Ernest (1990) New Reections on the Revolution of Our Time. London
and New York: Verso.
Laclau, Ernest and Mouffe, Chantal (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London and New York: Verso.
Mouffe, Chantal (1993) The Return of the Political. London and New York:
Verso.
207
PSC
Z
izek, Slavoj (1991) For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a
Political Factor. London: Verso.
Z
izek, Slavoj (1994) Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique
of I deology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Z
izek, Slavoj (1999) The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political
Ontology. London: Verso.
Z
izek, Slavoj (2001) Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? London: Verso.

208

BROCKELMAN - The Failure of The Radical Democractic Imaginary

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Thomas Brockelman

izek versus Laclau and Mouffe on

izeks political theory. Z

izeks position drives a wedge between two

izek, deeply critical, associates with the shortcomings of

izeks claim that he

izeks project that makes sense of his derision for anti-

izek is seen to offer us a powerful political theory, one that

izek has been remarkably prolic producing more than a book

izeks political theory have emerged from a

izek in such a context is certainly understandable:

izeks project from the

izek the political theorist

izeks thought. Indeed,

izek and the authors of Hegemony but rather

izek, Laclau and

izek, 2000: 302). In other words,

izek, 2000: 199). Laclau calls for democratic

izek has developed a critique

izeks appropriation of a term we have already seen

izeks understanding. In other words, the truth of society is that its

izeks critique of Laclau and Mouffe is that the profound insight

izek leads us to this conclusion through a consideration of

izek, to an Althusserian vision of the subject, one which con-

izeks apparently friendly

izek asks us to consider the

izek interprets it actually

izeks sustained polemic directed at the various kinds of histori-

izek articulates his own

izek and other radical democratic

izek and traditional universalists or struc-

izeks approach from theirs is the fact that the universal

izeks analyses will always contain the

izeks political theory is rst of all

izek, 2000: 100).

izeks answer, repeated throughout

izek likes to put it, every particular viewpoint

izek, 2000: 315).

izeks political thought to his psychoanalytic

izek, 1991: 196)

izeks critique of anti-essentialism is the

izek re-engages a kind of ideology critique

izek, projecting open identity as social ideal and thereby suppress-

izek, this self-contradiction manifests itself, not in some kind

izek, the hypocrisy of a kind of relativist universalism at

izek zeros in on the kind of sympto-

izek forces us to see that the kind of pc

izek, 1994: 214).

izek proposes that the anti-essentialism of Laclau

izeks project seems much closer to reduc-

izeks underscoring of the concrete universal really

izek thus writes in response to Laclaus work:

izek, 2000: 320)

izeks deduction of this priority for the material derives

izek, 2000: 321).

izeks theoretical position gains its saliency by con-

izek opens in Beyond Discourse Analysis,

izek on the other or between discourse

izek on the other hand we see a sharing out of the shards

izek taking up ideology critique.

izeks part. His half of critical theory

izeks work would be continuous with the position of the late